Arkadium Signs Social Game Publishing Deal With Microsoft Studios

Social and casual game developer Arkadium announced a multi-year publishing partnership with Microsoft Studios that will help the developer accelerate its cross-platform game development.

By AJ Glasser From Inside Social Games

Though few details were available on the agreement, we assume that it applies to Microsoft's Bing, MSN Messenger and Zone.com games portal where Arkadium games already appear. Beyond that, it is likely that Microsoft Studios would publish the games on Xbox Live Arcade or Windows Phone 7. It is unclear if the publishing deal extends to Facebook, where Arkadium currently enjoys 1 million monthly active users and over 200,000 daily active users as recorded by AppData traffic tracking service.

Statements included in the press releases from Microsoft Studios'Matt Booty, general manager of connected experiences, suggest that Microsoft is looking to expand its publishing beyond its web services, console and phone. Assuming the tech giant isn't attempting to launch a social network of its own to compete with Facebook and Google+, you could perhaps expect to see Microsoft Studios-published games on these platforms. Already, Microsoft has begun to soften its stance on publishing for rival platforms, recently bringing a version of its Xbox 360 game Kinectimals to iOS.

"Arkadium has a ten-year track record of developing entertaining and well-architected casual and social games," Booty's statement reads. "Our team is excited to be partnering with a developer that we believe will help us entertain millions of people as we expand our reach to a broader audience."